Vintage Best And Worst: WWE NXT 6/1/10 Season 1 Episode 15

– We’re now officially done with NXT season 1, so make sure you’re caught up here. If you’re interested in reading the weekly column about the Full Sail era, you can find that here. Justin Roberts meets the monster at the end of his book at the end of this week’s column.

At what point during Season 1 do you think Creative came up with the Nexus idea? I’m absolutely not going to give them credit for having the idea from the get-go. Hell, I wouldn’t be completely shocked if they came up with the idea in between the Season 1 finale and RAW that week, but I would be really interested to know how long they had it planned.

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Mentioned in a post below that according to WWE Countodwn on WWE Network, Nexus was a planned thing. The guys claimed they came up with it midway through, which would have us believe Creative always had this planned. I agree with you, I Connor possibly believe that everything about NXT was an intentionally huge waste of time to pay off with Nexus.

My favourite thing about the Nexus invasion and the thing that really sold it for me as it was happening live was Punk scrambling back into the ring to try and help Cena. It’s a small moment, but it made things feel dangerous in a different way.

I dont see why people think the Nexus was “botched” or mishandled. The angle was great, but it suffered a series of setbacks that were no one’s fault in particular.

Bryan getting fired was huge because it changed everything about how Nexus could work in the ring during matches. Seemed to work out pretty good for Bryan though. Tarver getting fired was fine, he was hot garbage, right there, 8–>6 guys right out of the gate. Otunga and D Young werent exactly setting the ring on fire, so you really only have 4 credible guys in Wade, Skip, Gabriel and Slater. And even thats pushing it with Gabriel and to an extent Slater. They just werent ready for prime time yet even though Slater adapted quickly. That left Wade and Skip. Then Skip broke his ankle at a house show and that was the end of it. The muscle hoss and the best technical wrestler were gone, leaving poor Wade to run the faction of misfit and green wrestlers.

Not to shill the WWE Network, but the most recent Countdown show 100% retconned the formation of the Nexus. As Barrett, Bryan, Slater and Otunga tell it, they were mad about NXT for all the reasons Brandon has maligned it in these recaps. They said about midway through the season they decided to form Nexus and just waited for their moment to get revenge on WWE for embarrassing them all season. Real good stuff.

One thing I never noticed before during that Nexus beat-down. Michael fucking Tarver getting in the middle of Bryan’s Cena owning moment, running up and elbowing him right as Bryan’s about to kick him, then being all “oh shit, sorry bro, go for it.”

It seemed to me at the time that WWE wanted the fans to pick Cena vs. Mysterio instead of Cena vs. Punk for that Raw main event. It’s kind of irrelevant in hindsight, but the Nexus attacking evil SES CM Punk as well as Cena made them seem a little more morally ambiguous.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the NXT season 2 writeups, mainly because LayCool is way cool.

Oh, definitely. Jerry Lawler was derping something about the fans picking Punk because “the fans want to see Cena beat up Punk and unmask him!” Rather than, y’know, fans liking Punk more than Mysterio.

It’s a happy accident that Punk won the vote, because a bad guy like Punk trying to save Cena made Nexus appear more dangerous than if it were Mysterio.

Friendly reminder (not that any of us need it), that the first Nexus storyline basically ended with John Cena deciding that it would be a great idea for him to get DDT’D ONTO CONCRETE AND THEN NO-SELL IT AND WIN ANYWAY.

Despite things working out the way they did, I’m still kind of bummed that they effectively took one of the best and most beloved indie stars and made him look like hot garbage for no reason.

There was a podcast where Jericho talked about how he and someone else tried to explain why that was a bad idea and Cena didn’t get it until like 3 weeks later when it suddenly hit him and Cena realized he shouldn’t have fought to win that one.

I was at this show sitting at ringside. I had a couple of gripes with it. One, was that Matt Hardy was suspended on Smackdown, but still appeared on NXT as if nothing happened. Another was that every pro stood up to say Otunga sucked, and yet he beat Gabriel in the Pros Poll.

But the show was still a blast. During the Triple Threat, I was talking trash to Jericho, and he flipped me off with his arm stretched out on the apron so cameras wouldn’t catch it.

There was a guy next to me who told Justin “You got this!” and Justin kinda nodded. Then Wade ran up to me thinking I screamed at Justin and started telling me he’ll fight me in the parking lot.

I also vaguely remember CM Punk and Josh Matthews having a funny argument during the break. Punk wrote JOSH SMELLS on a piece of paper and showed it off to the audience.

There were even better moments for Smackdown, but this is the NXT thread.

So is there actually something about Barrett that I’m missing regarding why he got relegated to a shit gimmick that he has single-handedly made amazing? He’s got the looks, he’s great on the mic, and he’s decent in the ring. Why was he made out to be such a goober after winning the IC Title?